Mr Biz on DougStephan.com

BOCA RATON, FLA. (Jan. 1, 2003)-Let us start the New Year by clearing
the air about an aspect of the rise and fall of Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss)
which has bugged me from the moment I watched Sen. Strom Thurmond's (R-SC)
100th birthday party on cable TV.
This is a long story. It is about Thurmond the Liberator of Jews and
civil rights activist. If you just know in your heart that it's a phony puff
piece, or that you know the only truth, just stop reading here. You won't be
the first reader-or editor, who, over the past 40 years hated the first two
paragraphs of my work.
It's about my personal journey of dealing with Thurmond, and isolating
his own, specific, life history from the stereotypes of his early politics
and its era.
The saddest part of the whole Lott tale, is that the majority leader's
ignorance of a number of facts regarding Thurmond-like the fate of the wife
of his biblical namesake, turned his political career into a pillar of salt.
Lott might still sit in the U.S. Senate, but just like that statue ya'all,
his career ain't goin' nowhere.
If you are a "conservative" I doubt you know the whole story.
If you are a totally open-minded, issue-oriented "independent" you
probably will not believe the story.
If you are a true, humanitarian, progressive, "liberal" you will reject
the story as revisionist history, but might do more research, and grudgingly
change some of your biases about Thurmond.
In 1992 as a full-time nightly talk radio host on Paxson and then Clear
Channel's WFTL-AM, Miami-Ft. Lauderdale, I interviewed an author named Louis
Mucciolo. Mr. Mucciolo a TV producer from Tucson, spent a few years tracking
down octogenarian celebrities with his tape recorder. The result was "Eight
Something," by Louis Mucciolo, Birch Lane Press, New York, 1992.
Along with personal interviews with Cesar Romero, Mitch Miller, Douglas
Fairbanks Jr. and others, is a transcribed-from-tape, 11- page chapter with
Strom Thurmond.
Mucciolo told me that Thurmond was 89 years old when the interview was
conducted. His hearing was poor but he seemed otherwise quite lucid and
alert. Mucciolo, who had criss-crossed the nation by car, with his wife
helping to research the project, found Thurmond a reluctant hero, but far
more forthcoming and complex than other biographical materials had revealed.
My impression of that radio program was that Mucciolo, and then in his
70s, had "clicked" with Thurmond.
He viewed Thurmond as a significant part of the rescue of thousand of
Nazi concentration camp survivors. He also viewed Thurmond as a former racist
who for political expediency, and/or genuine conversion, had embraced
integration and black rights with almost a religious fervor. Finally, he
viewed the Thurmond political machine in South Carolina as a socio-political
monopoly that reached into civic centers, parks, and city hall in communities
both black and white.
During the next decade, I anecdotally mentioned that radio show to some
friends. One buddy who has become a great veterans' rights advocate pointed
me to a number of quiet ceremonies where veterans' groups had lauded
Thurmond. Slowly, I even received news stories of some mostly-liberal and
Democratic Jewish organizations that had given human rights awards to
Thurmond. Funny, I didn't recall seeing those stories on the evening news.
I still couldn't cite Mucciolo or his book. Doing three or four hours of
live radio, five nights per week, for eight years, leaves lots of mental
wreckage.
However, just before Christmas, when some former United Press
International colleagues started swapping Lott, Thurmond, segregation, and
political stories online, I did some web searching and came up with the book
and author. On Amazon.com I purchased a copy for three bucks. (My own review
copy had long since been given away to one octogenarian friend or relative or
another.)
Space requires that these are excerpts, but I've tried to make them long
enough to capture not just the taped Mucciolo interview, but also the gist of
the entire context:
"In the early 1900s when I was growing up, segregation was a part of
life. EVERYTHING was separate-churches, schools, theater-sitting and so on.
It was the custom of the times. At the same time, though, I did work in the
fields with blacks. Where a black man was cutting grain, I'd come along to
pick up the grain and bundle it. And we worked together in the field
operations-hoeing, plowing, cutting, and all that. . . .You know this thing
of not letting children work is a great mistake. So long as they work in a
safe place and are old enough to do the work without harm, I think it's well
to encourage them to work."
While teaching and coaching after graduating with courses in agriculture
and writing (journalism) at Clemson, "…Sometime during those years there was
the idea that maybe I should go into politics someday, so I was kind of
watching my step, well, anyway, I started a program to take needy farm boys
to summer schools and camps. We taught them health, character, English, and a
lot of other things that were good for them besides farming. Half of them
couldn't afford to go, and I got churches and clubs to furnish scholarships
and some expenses."
He was elected school superintendent in 1928; state senator in 1933, and
sponsored school attendance laws and the first rural electrical cooperative
in the country. The Legislature elected him to the state's highest court in
1938. "The day Roosevelt declared war against Germany, I wanted to volunteer.
"They called in me a little later and when I first went in, it was as a
basic ROTC infantry officer. After a while when we were ready to go overseas,
headquarters noticed I was a lawyer and a judge so they put me into the
intelligence section G2. I was to go on exclusion cases with the FBI-that
related to Germans who might be dangerous. Later I went overseas with the
First Army and while there I went to London to a staff college.
"then the First Army called for three volunteers to go with the 82nd
Airborne division on D-Day. I volunteered for that, along with another major
and a captain. We went in on D-Day by glider. I would have preferred a
parachute jump but they said, 'Hey, you haven't had any training for
parachute jumping, so you go by glider.' I was mad at that because I was in
good physical condition and if they had taught me in one day what was needed,
I could have done it. You know, the gliders were tremendous targets; they
could get hit a lot easier than a chute. The division's mission was to land
between the German lines, those defending the beaches and those in reserve,
ready to be called up. So those reserves had to be cut off and that was
accomplished-with a lot of losses on both sides."
Back with the First Army a month later, marching through Europe, and into
the Battle of the Bulge: "…after the Battle of the Bulge, we went int5o
Germany, across the Rhine, and on through. We uncovered the concentration
camp at Buchenwald.
"The things I saw there I will never forget. The commander of the camp
was a cruel fellow and his wife must have been too. Anytime an inmate died
there, if he had a tattoo anywhere on the body, she would have it skinned off
and brought to her to make lampshades. . .There were bodies stacked up like
cordwood and you couldn't tell if some of them were alive or dead. The
doctors got in and saved some but the prisoners may have died later because
they had been starved for so long. It was just a terrible, terrible
situation. We got after the people who lived in the nearby town of Weimar and
asked them why they permitted such a thing, or did they know about it. They
claimed they heard about it, but didn't know what had gone on there an also
had them clean up some of the carnage. . ."
Thurmond never mentions in the interview that he was recipient of the
Legion of Merit with Oak Leaf Clusters, Bronze Star for Valor, Purple Heart,
Belgian Order of the Crown, French Croix de Guerre, and other honors. Members
of the 82nd Airborne Division Association have later told me of Thurmond
furiously getting on the radio and pulling Democratic Party strings with
Roosevelt, and indirectly to Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, to rush Red Cross and
other aid to Buchenwald and other camps in an attempt to stem the deaths that
continued after "liberation" of the camps. Eisenhower's order for newsreel
cameramen and townspeople to view the corpses may also have been sparked by
Thurmond's outrage at what he saw.
There is a long discussion of his presidential campaign, and of Southern
hatred of the Republican Party at the time, and his attempt to "beat Harry
Truman because he was campaigning to centralize more power in Washington." He
never mentions segregation, describes his gubernatorial and U.S. Senate
victories, and adds: " You'll have to check the records to see what I've
accomplished in the Senate and on the various committees-Judiciary, Armed
Services, Veterans Affairs, Labor and Human Resources."
He explains his switch to the GOP after a decade in the Senate. "…Oh, I
know there are people who think I'm ultraconservative and won't change my
ways. But let me tell you something-a person who can't respond to changes
can't last. And if you don't respond to changes, you can't best represent
your people. We had segregation in South Carolina and the whole South. But
when the Supreme Court handed down the decision, the South obeyed it, and
we've had less trouble than even states in the North. They're still throwing
bricks at school children in Massachusetts and Ohio and other places. We all
have to respond to change because it is inevitable. Take my support of the
fetal tissue bill for example. That surprises many people. Everybody knows
I'm a strong opponent of abortion. However, this isn't an abortion issue-it's
a RESEARCH issue, and there's great promise of new treatments for
Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other diseases. If I felt this bill would in any
way encourage abortions, I would not support it!
"I've always believed in being fair to black people because down South we
grew up with black people. I helped educate a great number of blacks when I
was in education, as a state senator, as governor, and since. We've organized
the Strom Thurmond Foundation, which today is helping to educate about eighty
people a year and about a third are black students. . ."
In a discussion of the future, and the future of politics, Thurmond-the
king of longevity-indicated that too many politicians were only worried about
getting re-elected.
"What we need to do is elect people to office who are interested in the
welfare of the country and not the next election. And some of them may have
to run knowing that they may get beat for doing what they've got to do."

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